80 Top Quotes From To Sell is Human
To Sell is Human by Daniel H. Pink challenges traditional perceptions of salesmanship and explores the art of persuasion and influence in the modern world. Pink argues that in today's information age, almost everyone is engaged in selling, whether it's pitching ideas, convincing others to buy products, or simply influencing opinions. Drawing on extensive research in social science, psychology, and economics, the book reveals the dynamic nature of selling and the essential skills required to be effective persuaders. Pink introduces the concept of "non-sales selling," emphasizing the importance of empathy, attunement, and problem-solving in building meaningful connections with others.
He dispels the myth of the pushy, manipulative salesperson and instead presents a more ethical and empathetic approach to moving others. Throughout the book, readers are treated to practical tips and techniques for improving their persuasive abilities, making it a valuable resource for anyone in sales, leadership, or communication roles. "To Sell is Human" is a refreshing and insightful take on the art of persuasion, offering readers a new perspective on how to engage and influence others in an increasingly interconnected world. (To Sell is Human Summary).
To Sell is Human Quotes
"Anytime you're tempted to upsell someone else, stop what you're doing and upserve instead.”
"This is what it means to serve: improving another’s life and, in turn, improving the world.”
"To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources—not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end.” (Meaning)
"The purpose of a pitch isn’t necessarily to move others immediately to adopt your idea. The purpose is to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings the other person in as a participant, and eventually arrives at an outcome that appeals to both of you.”
"In the new world of sales, being able to ask the right questions is more valuable than producing the right answers. Unfortunately, our schools often have the opposite emphasis. They teach us how to answer, but not how to ask.”
"A few of us are extraverts. A few of us are introverts. But most of us are ambiverts, sitting near the middle, not the edges, happily attuned to those around us. In some sense, we are born to sell.”
"Sales and theater have much in common. Both take guts. Salespeople pick up the phone and call strangers; actors walk onto the stage in front of them. Both invite rejection—for salespeople, slammed doors, ignored calls, and a pile of nos; for actors, a failed audition, an unresponsive audience, a scathing review. And both have evolved along comparable trajectories.”
"Extraverts, in other words, often stumble over themselves. They can talk too much and listen too little, which dulls their understanding of others’ perspectives. They can fail to strike the proper balance between asserting and holding back, which can be read as pushy and drive people away.*”
"Pitches that rhyme are more sublime.”
"Finally, at every opportunity you have to move someone—from traditional sales, like convincing a prospect to buy a new computer system, to non-sales selling, like persuading your daughter to do her homework—be sure you can answer the two questions at the core of genuine service. If the person you’re selling to agrees to buy, will his or her life improve? When your interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began? If the answer to either of these questions is no, you’re doing something wrong.”
"What an individual does day to day on the job now must stretch across functional boundaries. Designers analyze. Analysts design. Marketers create. Creators market.”
"Anytime you’re tempted to upsell someone else, stop what you’re doing and upserve instead. Don’t try to increase what they can do for you. Elevate what you can do for them.”
"In a world where anybody can find anything with just a few keystrokes, intermediaries like salespeople are superfluous. They merely muck up the gears of commerce and make transactions slower and more expensive.”
"We often understand something better when we see it in comparison with something else than when we see it in isolation.”
"Bezos includes one more chair that remains empty. It’s there to remind those assembled who’s really the most important person in the room: the customer.”
"Nineteen centuries ago, the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus said, “Nature hath given men one tongue but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.”
"Researchers have found that extraversion has “no statistically significant relationship . . . with sales performance”
"Questions can outperform statements in persuading others.”
"Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks prearranged. This is because they accept all offers made.”9”
"A world of flat organizations and tumultuous business conditions—and that’s our world—punishes fixed skills and prizes elastic ones.”
"A world of flat organizations and tumultuous business conditions – and that’s our world – punishes fixed skills and prizes elastic ones.”
"Every circumstance in which we try to move others by definition involves another human being. Yet in the name of professionalism, we often neglect the human element and adopt a stance that’s abstract and distant.”
"And, in its own sweet way, more beautiful than we realize. The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness.”
"Including a rhyme can enhance the processing fluency of your listeners, allowing your message to stick in their minds when they compare you and your competitors”
"The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness. It has helped our species evolve, lifted our living standards, and enhanced our daily lives. The capacity to sell isn’t some unnatural adaptation to the merciless world of commerce. It is part of who we are. As you’re about to see, if I’ve moved you to turn the page, selling is fundamentally human.”
"The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness.”
"McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the typical American hears or reads more than one hundred thousand words every day.”
"In those situations, the ability to move others hinges less on problem solving than on problem finding.”
"Alongside the chairs in which his executives, marketing mavens, and software jockeys take their places, Bezos includes one more chair that remains empty. It’s there to remind those assembled who’s really the most important person in the room: the customer.”
"Levity is that unseen force that lifts you skyward, whereas gravity is the opposing force that pulls you earthward. Unchecked levity leaves you flighty, ungrounded, and unreal. Unchecked gravity leaves you collapsed in a heap of misery,” she writes. “Yet when properly combined, these two opposing forces leave you buoyant.”15”
"Next time you're selling yourself, don't fixate only on what you achieved yesterday. Also emphasize the promise of what you could accomplish tomorrow.”
"The lesson here is critical: The purpose of a pitch isn’t necessarily to move others immediately to adopt your idea. The purpose is to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings the other person in as a participant, and eventually arrives at an outcome that appeals to both of you.”
"Was trying to solve a problem: How can I produce a good drawing? The second was trying to find a problem: What good drawing can I produce”
"Instead of swirling downward into frustration, “Yes and” spirals upward toward possibility. When you stop you’ve got a set of options, not a sense of futility.”
"The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness. It”
"Today, they must be good at asking questions—uncovering possibilities, surfacing latent issues, and finding unexpected problems.”
"When both parties view their encounters as opportunities to learn, the desire to defeat the other side struggles to find the oxygen it needs.”
"Across the thirty-five studies, the correlation between extraversion and sales performance was a minuscule 0.07.)”
"You might be surprised. Searching for similarities—Hey, I’ve got a dachshund, too!—may seem trivial. We dismiss such things as “small talk.” But that’s a mistake. Similarity—the genuine, not the manufactured, variety—is a key form of human connection. People are more likely to move together when they share common ground.”
"The balance of power has shifted—and how we’ve moved from a world of caveat emptor, buyer beware, to one of caveat venditor, seller beware—where honesty, fairness, and transparency are often the only viable path.”
"Unchecked levity leaves you flighty, ungrounded, and unreal. Unchecked gravity leaves you collapsed in a heap of misery,” she writes. “Yet when properly combined, these two opposing forces leave you buoyant.”
"Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan”
"Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.”
"Salespeople adept at improvising “can generate ideas, incorporate changes quickly and easily, and communicate effectively and convincingly during sales presentations.”5”
"Being honest about the existence of a small blemish can enhance your offering’s true beauty.”
"We’re persuading, convincing, and influencing others to give up something they’ve got in exchange for what we’ve got.”
"How to stay afloat amid that ocean of rejection is the second essential quality in moving others. I call this quality “buoyancy.”
"The “first step in salesmanship” was “autosuggestion,” “the principle through which the salesman saturates his own mind with belief in the commodity or service offered for sale, as well as in his own ability to sell.”
"That same year, Fuller salesmen, all of them independent dealers working on straight commission”
"People often find potential more interesting than accomplishment because it’s more uncertain, the researchers argue. That uncertainty can lead people to think more deeply about the person they’re evaluating—and the more intensive processing that requires can lead to generating more and better reasons why the person is a good choice. So next time you’re selling yourself, don’t fixate only on what you achieved yesterday. Also emphasize the promise of what you could accomplish tomorrow.”
"Listen without listening for anything.”
"Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, is a legend one day and a laggard the next. Retail video rental is a cash cow—until Netflix carves the industry into flank steak. All the while, the business cycle itself swooshes without much warning from unsustainable highs to unbearable lows like some satanic roller coaster.”
"Not looking at the student or the patient as a pawn on a chessboard but as a full participant in the game.”
"One of the most effective ways of moving others is to uncover challenges they may not know they have.”
"But the teacher works to convince his class to part with resources—time, attention, effort—and if they do, they will be better off when the term ends than they were when it began.”
"As some have noted, introverts are “geared to inspect,” while extraverts are “geared to respond.”35 Selling of any sort—whether traditional sales or non-sales selling—requires a delicate balance of inspecting and responding. Ambiverts can find that balance. They know when to speak up and when to shut up.”
"Identifying problems as a way to move others takes two”
"Treat everyone as you’d treat your grandmother, but assume that Grandma”
"Treat everyone as you’d treat your grandmother, but assume that Grandma has eighty thousand Twitter followers.”
"Practice interrogative self-talk. Next time you’re getting ready to persuade others, reconsider how you prepare. Instead of pumping yourself up with declarations and affirmations, take a page from Bob the Builder and pose a question instead. Ask yourself: “Can I move these people?” As social scientists have discovered, interrogative self-talk is often more valuable than the declarative kind. But don’t simply leave the question hanging in the air like a lost balloon. Answer it—directly and in writing. List five specific reasons why the answer to your question is yes. These reasons will remind you of the strategies that you’ll need to be effective on the task, providing a sturdier and more substantive grounding than mere affirmation.”
"In just three years, Kickstarter surpassed the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts as the largest backer of arts projects in the United States.9”
"But the most effective self-talk of all doesn’t merely shift emotions. It shifts linguistic categories. It moves from making statements to asking questions.”
"Physicians sell patients on a remedy. Lawyers sell juries on a verdict. Teachers sell students on the value of paying attention in class. Entrepreneurs woo funders, writers sweet-talk producers, coaches cajole players. Whatever our profession, we deliver presentations to fellow employees and make pitches to new clients. We try to convince the boss to loosen up a few dollars from the budget or the human resources department to add more vacation days.”
"The lesson: Clarity on how to think without clarity on how to act can leave people unmoved.”
"Selling makes many of us uncomfortable and even a bit disgusted (“ick,” “yuck,” “ugh”), in part because we believe that its practice revolves around duplicity, dissembling, and double-dealing.”
"Asymmetrical information creates all sorts of headaches. If the seller knows much more about the product than the buyer, the buyer understandably gets suspicious. What’s the seller concealing?”
"We do better when we move beyond solving a puzzle to serving a person.”
"..the social science shows something different and more nuanced. We human beings talk to ourselves all the time—so much, in fact, that it’s possible to categorize our self-talk. Some of it is positive, as in “I’m strong,” “I’ve got this,” or “I will be the world’s greatest salesman.””
"When honest sellers opt out, the only ones who remain are the shysters and the charlatans—pushy guys in suits using sleazy tactics to stick you with a heap of junk. Ick.”
"They think they know a lot about me, because I know a lot about them.”
"People want a fair deal from someone they like.”
"Buyers today aren’t “fully informed” in the idealized way that many economic models assume. But neither are they the hapless victims of asymmetrical information they once were.”
"But all of you are likely spending more time than you realize selling in a broader sense—pitching colleagues, persuading funders, cajoling kids. Like it or not, we’re all in sales now.”
"Flexible optimism—optimism with its eyes open.”
"When buyers can know more than sellers, sellers are no longer protectors and purveyors of information. They’re the curators and clarifiers of it—helping to make sense of the blizzard of facts, data, and options. “If a customer has any question at all,”
"This is what it means to serve: improving another’s life and, in turn, improving the world. That’s the lifeblood of service and the final secret to moving others.”
"The presence of so many salespeople in the planet’s largest economy seems peculiar given the two seismic economic events of the last decade—the implosion of the global financial system and the explosion of widespread Internet connectivity.”
"In one typical study, researchers found that physicians interrupt the majority of patients in the first eighteen seconds the patient speaks during an appointment, which often prevents the patient from describing what brought her to the office in the first place.”
"Power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to others’ perspective.”
"The more you explain bad events as temporary, specific, and external, the more likely you are to persist even in the face of adversity.”
"Americans love complaining about bloated governments—but America’s sales force outnumbers the entire federal workforce by more than 5 to 1.”
"It is in fact the discovery and creation of problems rather than any superior knowledge, technical skill, or craftsmanship that often sets the creative person apart from others in his field.”
"Some work in posh offices with glorious views, others in dreary cubicles with Dilbert cartoons and a free calendar.”
"The purpose of a pitch isn’t necessarily to move others immediately to adopt your idea. The purpose is to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings the other person in as a participant, and eventually arrives at an outcome that appeals to both of you. In a world where buyers have ample information and an array of choices, the pitch is often the first word, but it’s rarely the last.”
"Power can move you off the proper position on the dial and scramble the signals you receive, distorting clear messages and obscuring more subtle ones.”
"Nowadays, everyone—whether we’re the head of an organization or its freshest hire—faces a torrent of information. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the typical American hears or reads more than one hundred thousand words every day.”
― Quotes from the book To Sell is Human by Daniel H. Pink
To Sell is Human Author
As a leading voice on the changing landscape of work and motivation, Daniel H. Pink has influenced the way we perceive and understand human behavior in professional settings. His book, "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us," challenges traditional notions of extrinsic rewards and uncovers the power of intrinsic motivation. Pink convincingly argues that autonomy, mastery, and purpose are the key drivers behind peak performance and fulfillment in modern workplaces. Drawing on a vast array of scientific research, Pink's work transcends beyond the conventional self-help genre, providing actionable insights for leaders, entrepreneurs, and individuals alike. Through his engaging and lucid prose, Pink continues to reshape our perspectives on motivation and guide us towards a more fulfilling and productive work life.
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
